The golden problem of Cidri

[JohnPaulB]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

The low price of gold and silver on Cidri is because the Mnoren like gold and silver and made sure there was lots of it about. I wonder, though, whether the supply of gold on Cidri, ample as it may seem, is finite.

On Earth we expect to exhaust mines, find new mines by exploration or by improving our mining technology, run as fast as we can to stay in one place and hope we don't stumble.

On Cidri none of that is happening: societies have been around a while, technology isn't really improving. So we should be running out of valuable and easily accessed ores. Unless there are Mnoren machines still making more?

One of the byproducts of Alchemy's Philospher Stone is turning base metals into gold. So there would be a low quantity of gold being 'created' all the time.

[EKB]

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

I prefer a 100:1 silver-to-gold ratio.

That's what I ended up settling on as well.

The handwave / in-setting justification I used is that the silver-to-gold ratio was originally 10:1, but then shifted over time to 100:1, with 'gold' coins becoming more and more debased until they were less than 10% gold, with the remainder being close to equal proportions of silver and copper. Then caches of "old" gold coins were discovered and started to circulate at a ratio of 100 silver to each old-gold coin. The debased coins started to be referred to as 'electrum' pieces, and new, un-debased gold coins started to be minted with a face value of 100 silver dollars.

[EKB]

Originally Posted by JohnPaulB

One of the byproducts of Alchemy's Philospher Stone is turning base metals into gold. So there would be a low quantity of gold being 'created' all the time.

In Etan, my TFT game world, there are natural super-natural processes that do this. In my other worlds, alchemists are able to transmute silver into gold (and back again) at whatever that world's silver-to-gold ratio happens to be fixed at. E.g. where the silver-to-gold ratio is 20:1 it takes 20 ounces of silver to alchemically produce 1 ounce of gold.

Which is why the silver-to-gold ration is fixed at whatever ratio: When excessive amounts of silver come on the market, lowering the price of silver relative to gold, then alchemists profit by transforming the excess silver into gold. And vice versa when there's a shortage of silver, raising its price relative to gold.

(This also occurs in Etan, but it's a much less important process there.)